One day the Government may need to stage an intervention in Sydney’s plushest suburbs, Byron Bay’s glorious expanse, and the genteel landscape of the Adelaide Hills.
These are the places where some children’s lives are at risk because parents have entirely lost trust in governments, and are turning to some dodgy alternative sources of health information.
Studies by the Federal health department, CSIRO and the National Centre for Immunisation Research and Surveillance have shown that while overall Australia’s uptake of vaccination is good – mostly around 90 per cent for children - in certain regions the levels of conscientious objectors have soared, resulting in clusters of deadly diseases.
Just over one per cent of Australians are conscientious objectors – but in some areas it’s up to one in five. NSW Health figures show there are 300 per cent more cases of whooping cough in areas with low vaccination rates.
That’s a bitch of a disease, by the way, one that can and has killed babies. Babies too young to be fully immunised themselves.
NCIRS deputy director Rob Menzies said in a recent news report that highly educated people doing their own research were most likely to reject advice to immunise.
“(A lot) of people are likely to find wacky anti-vaccination sites where a lot of the information is distorted,” he said.
NSW paediatrician Dr Chris Ingall added this: “We’re appalled at how many kids are getting whooping cough because the chardonnay set and the alternatives don’t vaccinate their children”.
He added that his current advice was to ‘cocoon’ newborns; keeping them out of the community and thus out of danger.
The vaccination debate always hits as the flu season kicks in; as it’s doing now. There will be the usual complaints from people who had the flu jab and then get a cold that obviously the needle didn’t work.
And plenty of people will remember with foreboding what happened last year, when CSL’s product Fluvax – a really bad batch of vaccine - triggered febrile convulsions in one in 100 children who received it.
The story of Fluvax, and those affected by it, and by swine flu, was explored in a great piece in the latest Weekend Australian magazine. The feature by Natasha Bita wades into the murky waters of childhood immunisation and rightly comes up with many answers, but no single, overarching answer (unfortunately the anti-vaxxers have taken the fact the article actually explored some of the risks of vaccination as proof that it is evil).
There is never just one answer to the question of vaccination because it, like almost every child rearing decision, is a matter of weighing up risks and benefits.
Conscientious objectors are failing in that decision-making process; in their minds the risks are exaggerated, the benefits forgotten. So we have these pockets where parents are doing the equivalent of locking their children indoors to protect them from paedophiles, because they misunderstand the relevant risks.
The negative press from the Fluvax case has spread across to other types of vaccinations, ones in which side effects are rare and the health benefits striking.
If more people start to reject vaccination, and the government fails to make up the numbers by making sure there are no other obstacles to vaccination, the worst-case scenario is increasing numbers of children dying, being brain damaged, irreversibly damaged from diseases like whooping cough, or measles.
Of course the government will not ‘intervene’. Governments have to do something much more difficult than that; and that’s to earn the trust of the skeptical ‘chardonnay sets’ and ‘alternatives’. That these highly educated people think the Australian Vaccination Network and its ilk are a better source of information than the authorities is a fairly embarrassing indictment on our dear leaders.
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